1% of entire world population involved in wine industry?

I just heard this on the History Channel, on “A Brief History of Wine”. I have a great deal of trouble believing this. But then again… we are a planet of swillers. :slight_smile:

A Google Search hasn’t confirmed or denied this claim. Can anybody come up with better search parameters and find out the truth?

Directly no, that’s absurd, but if they are stretching the term “involved” to measure all manufacturing and service businesses associated with the distribution, marketing etc. etc. of wine (among other things) then maybe, but the word “involved” in this context would have to be pretty stretchy.

Maybe by “involved” they mean the customers, too? I suppose you could loosely include “buying” the wine as a part of the wine industry.

Though that’s a pretty useless statistic, it’s the only way that 1% is believable to me.

Does that include the waiters and bartenders who serve glasses of it? The guys at the shipping company who unload the crates? The high-school kid at the grocery store who makes me scan the bottle myself? The garbageman who takes the bottle away with my trash? The kitchen store that sold me my corkscrew?

I’d believe the 1%, but a lot of those people are involved in other industries as well- they aren’t working exclusively with wine.

If it includes the customers, I’d expect the figure would be much higher than 1%. It might well include stockholders, though.

Unfortunately, this phrase was included in the first 30 second program intro, and not backed up with any more intro. It was also at 1 AM, and I admit I didn’t stay up to the end of the program.

If you threw in every wine grower, every shipper (surface and sea), every liquor store employee, every restaurant employee where wine is served, every grocery store employee where wine is sold, and maybe even every stockholder in any company that does those things, does it seem plausible then? It kind of does to me, but it seems a dereadful stretching of the definition.

You could also say that 52% of the US is involved in the coal industry (as a consumer), since that is about how much of our electricity comes from coal…

I think it might not be that far off. 1% of the world’s population is c.50 million people.
If you add the entire rural populations of Italy, Spain and the South of France, that’s a whole bunch of people. An awful lot of them will be involved in the wine industry. Growing a few grapes, helping out at harvest.
Add in all the seasonal work in either Australia or California (again, maybe just a few weeks a year, but it’s a lobour intensive few weeks).
Now add in rural populations from Argentina, Southern Russia, the Ukraine, Greece or any country which produces large quantities of wine without much in the way of mechanical harvesting, then the numbers climb again.

Just to give you an idea, 11,000 people are involved in the State of Washington with 12,000 hectares of vines. There are 364,000 hectres of vineyards in the USA and nearly 8 million hectares worldwide.

Simple arithmetic gives us around 7 million people involved. And that assumes the rest of the world grows wine as a hi-tech agri-business. I think the 1% figure is looking like a good estimate.